Golden tiger

A golden tiger, golden tabby tiger or strawberry tiger is a tiger with a color variation caused by a recessive gene. The coloration is a result of captive breeding, inbreeding and can simply not occur in the wild. Like the white tiger, it is a color form and not a separate species.

No official name has been designated for the colour. It is sometimes referred to as the strawberry tiger due to the strawberry blonde coloration. Their striping is much paler than usual and may fade into spots or large prominent patches. Golden tigers also tend to be larger and, due to the effect of the gene on the hair shaft, have softer fur than their orange relatives.

Few zoos have bred or exhibited golden tigers and many have no knowledge of the color or its mode of inheritance. It therefore usually appears by accident when breeding orange and white tigers together, rather than through planning. As white tigers and heterozygous normal colored tigers carrying the wide band gene are traded and loaned between zoos and circuses for breeding, that gene becomes more widespread. When their descendants are mated together, the golden tiger color is passed on to the offspring if both parents are gene carriers. Unless golden tabby cubs are born, the zoos may have no idea that the parents carry that gene.

The first golden tiger cub born in captivity was in 1983 and this came from standard-colored Bengal tigers, both of whom carried the recessive genes for both the golden tiger and white colors. It was born at Dr. Josip Marcan's Adriatic Animal Attractions in DeLand, Florida.

An example of a golden tiger is in Dream World in Australia. Samara, a normal orange tigress, had been mated with nearly-stripeless white male tiger, Mohan. Her litter included one normal orange cub (Sultan), the first white tiger born in Australia (Taj, also nearly stripeless), and the first two tabby-colored tigers (male Rama and female Sita) born in Australia. The cubs weighed around 1.5 kilograms and measured approximately 30 centimetres in length. They were removed from their mother soon after birth and hand raised. The births and hand-raising process were filmed and presented in an hour long documentary. Golden tabby Sita will be mated to an unrelated normal orange tiger called Kato.

Diamond, a male golden tiger, is housed at the Isle of Wight Zoo in the UK. Because he is inseparable from his normal coloured sister, who also carries the golden gene, Diamond was castrated to prevent inbreeding, although due to his sister being a heterozygous carrier for the gene, there is a chance that any offspring may express the gene in their phenotype. Glasgow Zoo's golden tiger, Butu, obtained from Longleat, went to Germany when Glasgow Zoo closed. Longleat in the UK previously had an elderly golden tiger named Sonar, but he died in 2006. In Autumn 2010, a golden tabby tiger, Shami, was born in a zoo in ZOOPARK in Næstved, Denmark. It's the first of its kind to be born in Scandinavia, and only the third in Europe. In May 2012, two more golden tabby tigers were born at the ZOOPARK.

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Wikipedia